His courteous demeanour, and fair
words, disarmed their hostility, and he was allowed to pass. Fearing,
however, a general rising of the natives against him, and urged to
despatch by his guides, he pushed on by forced marches, and entering
the passes of Olympus, descended into the southern plain of Macedonia,
whose king Perdiccas, a shifty and treacherous barbarian, though
nominally in alliance with Athens, favoured the enterprise of
Brasidas.
Perdiccas had undertaken to provide pay for half the Spartan force, in
return for help to be rendered against a rebel chieftain with whom he
was at war. But Brasidas, whose main object was to raise a revolt
among the Athenian allies, insisted on entering into negotiations with
the rebel, and having patched up a truce, conducted his troops to the
neighbourhood of Acanthus, a town on the eastern side of the
Chalcidian peninsula, where there was a party discontented with the
Athenian rule. In all the cities subject to Athens the general mass of
the people were found loyal towards her, or, at the worst, disinclined
for any change; and Acanthus was no exception. When Brasidas with his
little army appeared before the walls the people at first refused him
admission. But it was just before the vintage, and their grapes were
hanging in ripe clusters, exposed to the hand of the spoiler; and so,
to save their vineyards from ravage, they were at last induced to give
him a hearing.
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